Juanita Long Hall

1901-1968

Singer, actor, music director

The first African-American woman to win a Tony Award, singer and actor Juanita Long Hall became most famous for stage and film roles in which she played Asian characters. According to many critics, she "stole the show" in her portrayal of Bloody Mary in the musical South Pacific, for which she won the Tony Award in 1950. Hall also enjoyed a long and distinguished career as a concert artist and nightclub singer.

Hall was born in 1901 in Keyport, New Jersey. Her mother died during Hall's infancy, and the girl was raised primarily by her grandmother, who encouraged her interest in music. As a child, Hall sang in church choirs and became fascinated by Negro spirituals, which she heard performed at a revival meeting near her home. "The whole quality of the singing grabbed hold of me," she recalled in remarks quoted in Notable Black American Women. Hall knew by then that she would pursue a career as a singer.

At age 14 Hall began teaching singing at Lincoln House in East Orange, New Jersey. In her teens she married an actor, Clement Hall; the marriage ended in divorce and Hall did not marry again. She moved to New York City and studied orchestration, harmony, theory, and voice at the Juilliard School of Music. She also took private lessons in voice and acting.

Hall did choral work and spent many years appearing in minor stage roles before achieving stardom. She began working with the Hall Johnson Choir in the 1920s, becoming a soloist and serving as assistant director until she formed her own choral group, the Juanita Hall Choir, in 1936. This choir, which operated for five years as a Works Progress Administration (WPA) group, gave more than 5,000 performances, including thrice-weekly radio concerts broadcast on WNYC and a concert at the 1939 World's Fair in New York City. Hall also opened a private voice studio.

Hall's stage debut came in 1928, with a role in the Ziegfeld production of Show Boat. In the 1940s the singer appeared in several productions, including The Pirates, Deep Are the Roots, and St. Louis Woman, in which she had a solo number, "Racin' Forms." Though Hall received rave reviews for her performance in St. Louis Woman, her breakthrough role did not come until 1949, when Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, who had heard her sing the year before in an audition for the revue Talent 48 cast her in their musical, South Pacific. She played Bloody Mary, an Asian woman who sells souvenirs on a Pacific island where U.S. naval personnel are stationed during World War II. A smash hit, the show ran for more than five years on Broadway, and many of its songs—including "Bali Hai," sung by Hall—became international standards. South Pacific won the Pulitzer Prize for drama and nine Tony awards. In addition to Hall's award for best performance by a featured actress, the show won for best performances in all the other acting categories as well. When South Pacific was made into a film in 1958, Hall again played Bloody Mary. Oddly, however, her songs for the film were dubbed by Muriel Smith, who had played the role in a London production.

The success of South Pacific established Hall, at age 49, as one of the leading black performers on Broadway in the 1950s. According to the Dictionary of American Biography (DNB), a newspaper columnist reported that Hall was so famous that the post office delivered letters to her addressed simply "Bloody Mary, N.Y.C." When South Pacific was in its second year, Hall received a salary increase and she "switched from whiskey to champagne to enjoy life," as quoted in DNB.

In 1954 Hall starred in "The Story of Ruby Valentine," the first radio program broadcast on the National Negro Network. Later that year she played Madame Tango, the owner of a West Indian bordello, in the 1954 musical House of Flowers, which starred Pearl Bailey and Diahann Carroll. In 1958 Hall appeared in another Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, Flower Drum Song, playing a Chinese woman, Madame Liang. She also played this role in the 1961 film version of the musical, for which she won the Laurel Award for top female supporting performance.

In addition to her stage and film work, Hall maintained a busy vocal performance schedule through the 1950s and 1960s. She appeared in several top nightclubs, including the Café Society in New York, and the Saint Moritz and the Flamingo in Las Vegas. She also performed at Chicago's Black Orchid and at The Flame in Detroit, and was seen on popular television variety shows, including Philco Television Playhouse, The Ed Sullivan Show, The Perry Como Show, and The Today Show. In concerts, Hall loved to perform the spirituals that had affected her so profoundly as a child.

She was also interested in the blues, having been influenced by the music of Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday, and in 1949 made a recording that included four blues lyrics written for her by poet Langston Hughes. In the late 1950s, she recorded a full album, Juanita Hall Sings the Blues. Supporting her on this recording were jazz luminaries Coleman Hawkins on tenor sax and Doc Cheatham on trumpet. According to album notes on the Concord Music Group Web site, the "authenticity of her [blues] renditions" on this recording was a "revelation."

By the 1960s Hall's career had started to fade and her health was in decline. But she was able to appear on stage in 1966 in A Woman and the Blues, a tribute blues singers Billie Holiday and Ethel Waters. Hall spent her final years in poverty after an investment in a New York City restaurant, The Fortune Cookie, failed. Her friends and family arranged for her to live in an actors' home in New Jersey and then on Long Island, where she died in 1968.

Hall is remembered as a consummate professional and a thoughtful colleague. "I think everyone who had anything to do with her loved her," wrote Richard Rodgers, as quoted in Notable Black American Women. "As an actress, she was…a joy to work with."

Selected works

Films

Miracle in Harlem, 1948.

South Pacific, 1958.

Flower Drum Song, 1961.

Plays

Show Boat, 1928.

Green Pastures, 1930.

The Pirates, 1942.

Sing Out, Sweet Land, 1944.

The Secret Room, 1944.

Deep Are the Roots, 1945.

St. Louis Woman, 1946.

Mr. Peebles and Mr. Hooker, 1946.

S.S. Glencairn, 1948.

Moon of the Caribees, 1948.

South Pacific, 1949.

House of Flowers, 1954.

Flower Drum Song, 1958.

At a Glance …

Born on November 6, 1901, in Keyport, NJ; died on February 29, 1968, in Bayshore, NY. married Clement Hall (divorced). Education: Attended Juilliard School of Music.

Career: Singer in stage productions, New York, NY and traveling, 1928-1958; Hall Johnson Choir, New York, NY, soloist, 1920s-1936, assistant director, 1931-1936; founder and director, Juanita Hill Choir, 1936-1941; performer in nightclubs, 1950-1962; film actor and concert artist.

Awards: Antoinette Perry (Tony) Award and Donaldson Award, Best Performance by a Featured Actress in a Musical, South Pacific, 1950; Bill "Bojangles" Acting Award, 20th Century Fox Appreciation Award, and Box Office Film Association Award, for film South Pacific, 1958; Laurel Award, top female supporting performance, for film Flower Drum Song, 1962.

Sources

Books

Dictionary of American Biography, Supplement 8: 1966-1970, American Council of Learned Societies, 1988.

Notable Black American Women, Book 1, Thomson Gale, 1992.

Periodicals

Jet, April 10, 2006, p. 24.

New York Times, February 15, 2003.

On-line

"Juanita Hall," African American Registry, www.aaregistry.com/african_american_history/1274/Juanita_Hall_great_singer_great_actress (June 26, 2007).

"Juanita Hall," Concord Music Group,http://concordmusicgroup.com/artists/?name=Juanita+Hall (June 26, 2007).